That's Not Gross! Sexual Arousal Lessens Disgust

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Feeling disgusted? For women, chasing away the stomach-churning
emotion may be as easy as seeking sexual arousal.

Disgust
is a powerful feeling that helps defend people from potentially
sickening circumstances. Objectively, sexual intercourse could be
seen as one of those circumstances, involving, as it does, saliva
and other bodily fluids. But new research raises the interesting
question of how a vital but potentially icky activity such as sex
can seem pleasant and doable.Perhaps it's because sexual arousal
somehow dampens the natural disgust response.

To delve into the mysteries of disgust and sex, investigators
asked 90 heterosexual female volunteers to complete 16 different
tasks that seemed revolting, such as drinking juice from a
cup with a large insect in it, wiping their hands with a used
tissue, or sticking their fingers in a bowl of used condoms. The
women were not aware that the insect was actually made of
plastic, the tissue was only colored with yellowish-brown ink to
make it appear used, and the condoms were new and only covered in
lubricant.

The scientists also had a third of the women watch
female-friendly erotica — "de Gast" (Dutch for "The Guest") by
Christine le Duc. Another third of the women watched
adrenaline-inducing films about sports such as rafting or
skydiving. The last third, the control group, just saw footage of
a train ride.

The researchers found that the women exposed to sexually arousing
material found activities that might otherwise seem sexually
disgusting, such as touching seemingly used condoms,
significantly less nasty than the other participants. To a lesser
extent, sexually
aroused women also found non-sex-related disgusting tasks
less foul.

"From a clinical angle, these findings give us insight into
important
problems of sexual arousal and
sexual pain disorders — for example, vaginismus and
dyspareunia," researcher Charmaine Borg, a psychologist at the
University of Groningen in the Netherlands, told LiveScience.
"These are two disorders that make penile-vaginal penetration
either completely impossible or possible but with pain."

"Perhaps in women with sexual dysfunctions such as dyspareunia or
vaginismus, arousal does not impact on disgust," Borg said. This
could in turn lead to problems during sexual encounters such as
lack of proper natural lubrication, "which in turn could increase
friction and cause problems such as pain during intercourse."

The scientists detailed their findings online Sept. 12 in the
journal PLoS ONE.